The relevance, says the university, is that “this unprecedented atomic accuracy may yield the elementary building block for a future quantum computer with unparalleled computational efficiency.” Paul Ducklin of Sophos discusses the implications in a NakedSecurity blog. Quantum computers are likely to have a major effect on our current security because, says Ducklin, they “are expected to be able to approach certain crypto-cracking tasks - such as factoring large prime products - at rates which might undermine our current assumptions about security.”
But the gist of Ducklin’s discussion is that we may not need to worry just yet. For two reasons. Firstly, he notes the university’s laboratory conditions that were required to produce the single transistor were at liquid helium temperatures. “That's somewhere around minus 270°C,” he says. “A modern CPU, however, needs thousand of millions of densely packed transistors, and runs at room temperature and above.”
Secondly, our current asymmetric encryption-based security is based on the mathematical difficulty in factoring very, very large near prime numbers; that is, a very large prime number that is the product of two large prime numbers. How do you find the original two numbers if they are secret? One approach designed for quantum computing is Shor’s algorithm which, given an algorithm N, will find its prime factors.
Ducklin points to a research paper published by the UK’s Bristol university as recently as November 2011. “We probably have a way to go before that happens, though. The institution at the bleeding edge of factoring prime products using quantum computing seems to be the University of Bristol, where researchers recently took apart the number 21.”
However, none of this changes the likelihood that one day in the future we will have quantum computers capable of cracking much of our current encryption-based security. When that day comes, we will probably have to use the same computers to create new security that they cannot crack.